Varsha Sadekar

Broadcast storm mitigation techniques in vehicular ad hoc networks

Several multihop applications developed for vehicular ad hoc networks use broadcast as a means to either discover nearby neighbors or propagate useful traffic information to other vehicles located within a certain geographical area. However, the conventional broadcast mechanism may lead to the so-called broadcast storm problem, a scenario in which there is a high level of contention and collisions at the link layer due to an excessive number of broadcast packets. While this is a well-known problem in mobile ad hoc wireless networks, only a few studies have addressed this issue in the VANET context, where mobile hosts move along the roads in a certain limited set of directions as opposed to randomly moving in arbitrary directions within a bounded area. Unlike other existing works, we quantify the impact of broadcast storms in VANETs in terms of message delay and packet loss rate in addition to conventional metrics such as message reachability and overhead. Given that VANET applications are currently confined to using the DSRC protocol at the data link layer, we propose three probabilistic and timer-based broadcast suppression techniques: weighted p-persistence, slotted 1-persistence, and slotted p-persistence schemes, to be used at the network layer. Our simulation results show that the proposed schemes can significantly reduce contention at the MAC layer by achieving up to 70 percent reduction in packet loss rate while keeping end-to-end delay at acceptable levels for most VANET applications.

Routing in Sparse Vehicular Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) may exhibit a bipolar behavior, i.e., the network can either be fully connected or sparsely connected depending on the time of day or on the market penetration rate of the wireless communication devices. In this paper, we use empirical vehicle traffic data measured on 1-80 freeway in California to develop a comprehensive analytical framework to study the disconnected network phenomenon and its network characteristics. These characteristics shed light on the key routing performance metrics of interest in disconnected VANETs, such as the average time taken to propagate a packet to disconnected nodes (i.e., the re-healing time). Our results show that, depending on the sparsity of vehicles or the market penetration rate of cars using Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) technology, the network re-healing time can vary from a few seconds to several minutes. This suggests that, for vehicular safety applications, a new ad hoc routing protocol will be needed as the conventional ad hoc routing protocols such as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) will not work with such long re-healing times. In addition, the developed analytical framework and its predictions provide valuable insights into the VANET routing performance in the disconnected network regime.

Broadcasting in VANET

In this paper, we report the first complete version of a multi-hop broadcast protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). Our results clearly show that broadcasting in VANET is very different from routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) due to several reasons such as network topology, mobility patterns, demographics, traffic patterns at different times of the day, etc. These differences imply that conventional ad hoc routing protocols such as DSR and AODV will not be appropriate in VANETs for most vehicular broadcast applications. We identify three very different regimes that a vehicular broadcast protocol needs to work in: i) dense traffic regime; ii) sparse traffic regime; and iii) regular traffic regime. We build upon our previously proposed routing solutions for each regime and we show that the broadcast message can be disseminate efficiently. The proposed design of the distributed vehicular broadcast (DV-CAST) protocol integrates the use of various routing solutions we have previously proposed.

On the Broadcast Storm Problem in Ad hoc Wireless Networks

Routing protocols developed for ad hoc wireless networks use broadcast transmission to either discover a route or disseminate information. More specifically, reactive routing protocols has to flood the network with a route request (RREQ) message in order to find an optimal route to the destination. Several applications developed for vehicular ad hoc wireless networks (VANET), which is a subset of MANET, rely on broadcast to propagate useful traffic information to other vehicles located within a certain geographical area. However, the conventional broadcast mechanism may lead to the so-called broadcast storm problem. In this paper, we explore how serious the broadcast storm problem is in both MANET and VANET by examining how broadcast packets propagate in a 2-dimensional open area and on a straight road or highway scenarios. In addition, we propose three novel distributed broadcast suppression techniques; i.e., weighted p-persistence, slotted 1-persistence, and slotted p- persistence schemes. Our simulation results show that the proposed schemes can achieve up to 90% reduction in packet loss rate while keeping the end-to-end delay at acceptable levels for most VANET applications. They can also be used together with the route discovery process to guide the routing protocols to select routes with fewer hop counts.